Enviromom's Challenge

This is going to be a tough one for my family!

Enviromom is challenging us to produce no more than one can of trash per month (see banner on the sidebar for a link). Wow, that is REALLY a challenge.

I am guessing right now we make about 6-7 cans of trash a month. Maybe 5 at the best. So how can we possibly get the trash to be that much less? Here's my plan:

BUYING/NOT BUYING
I think it starts with buying. My family needs to buy food with less packaging. This can be done by buying in bulk (more food, less waste), choosing a better packaged product over another, or just NOT buying. We no longer buy individual yogurts because nowhere around here recycles anything above a #3. One of the big obstacles is going to be Jack's fruit snacks. I'm not a big fan of small packages inside bigger packages because that's extra trash, but he LOVES them. Anyone have any ideas for tasty, easy, little kid snacks that I can replace the fruit snacks with?

RECYCLING
We're a real recycling family but I have to admit, there are some things that might not make it to the recycling bins. For some reason, toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls always seem to end up in the trash instead of paper recycling. Why? Who knows...maybe some kind of mental block because they aren't flat like paper? So I'll be on the lookout for any recyclable paper products that may have been preciously overlooked.

REUSING
The packaging we haven't yet eliminated (like the large yogurt containers) we wash and reuse for storage of little doodads. I also have given some away on freecycle. And I am eventually going to get around to making yogurt so we don't have those containers.

COMPOSTING
After watching the composting video on youtube, I'm excited to do it. I need to find red wiggler worms, though. Any Harford County readers out there who know where I can get some? So when I get the worms, we're going to start this. For some reason I am kind of nervous about it...I hope it works!

So we do have room for a lot of improvement. I am fairly sure we will NOT reduce to 1 can a month, but we can improve...that's an important thing to note: you don't have to be the perfect, all or nothing green person. Anything you do, as small as it may be, helps!

"Reduce", recycle's less popular friend

We hear "reduce, re-use and recycle" a lot. By far, the most popular of these three guys is recycle. Why? I'm guessing that it's because it's the easiest.

Re-using takes some creativity...what am I going to do with the stack of 32oz yogurt containers that are coded #5... so far I can't find ANYONE to recycle these guys.

In my region, only plastics numbered 1, 2 and 3's can be recycled. I guess they could be used for some kind of storage if I was into beading or something...and they're too small for my son's Legos...

So while I haven't found out what to do with the stack of yogurt containers I have, I did figure out a way to stop accumulating them...REDUCE!!! So no more buying those containers of yogurt. Instead, I bought a yogurt maker. If that works out, it'll be 2 less containers a week (wow...that's over 100 a year...just for my family!) And the bonus...it's cheaper!

And while we're reducing our use of products using non or hard to recycle containers, we're going to ditch the tub butter (also the #5 packaging). Instead, back to stick margarine.

And even recyclable stuff...well it takes energy to recycle. We're going to switch over to shampoo in bar format...no more bottles to recycle after we finish our "pumpable shampoo"! I'll let you know how the bar shampoo works out.

Having all those yogurt containers piled up definitely made me realize recycling isn't the real solution...reducing my purchasing of this kind of packaging.

How do you REDUCE?